Thursday, January 15, 2009 |
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Walking Cultural Activism: A Personal Relationship |
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By Greg Perkins @ 3:12 PM   
Tammy and I thought it would be great to produce a series of T-shirt designs for those occasions when it is appropriate to wear our ideas on our sleeves. Bonus points if they aren't just provocative but actually spark some good engagement!Here's a design that offers a simple, wry response to the oddly-fashionable notion that Christianity isn't a religion (no sir, it's a relationship with Jesus): I have a personal relationship with reality.You can't tell at that resolution, but the font sports a distressed typewriter look, and there is a subtle emphasis on the word 'reality'. Here's a closer look: (Just click through to BoltOfReason.Com to check out all the available styles and colors. We of course love suggestions and requests -- we're already working on a lot of fun ideas, and if you are the first to hit us with a new one that we use in a future shirt design, you'll get one for free!) Labels: Activism, Cool, Shameless Commerce Division
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Thursday, November 20, 2008 |
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There Are A Lot Of People In China |
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By Paul Hsieh @ 12:06 AM
Today's Eric Daniels-type bit of trivia comes from Strange Maps":China is the world's most populous nation. That much anybody knows. But even if we know a bit more (that the number of Chinese is around 1.32 billion, which is just under 20% of all humans alive today), that figure is still too big to mean much beyond that China is 'number one'.
This map compares the population of China's provinces (plus the 'renegade province' of Taiwan), autonomous regions and municipalities with those of whole countries, and thus helps shed some light on that issue.
China is an interesting country in that it is no longer committed ideologically to Communism, but it is no where close to a free country. Instead, the ideology is a mixture of authoritarianism, nationalism, and some market elements. Hence, I'm glad that there are people interested in translating Ayn Rand's works into Chinese.
If Rand's ideas ever took hold there, China could become a true powerhouse on the world stage. On the other hand, if a different bad ideology became entrenched in place of Communism, we could be looking at a huge menace.
(Via Dave Does The Blog.)Labels: Cool, Foreign Policy
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Who Owns The West? |
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By Paul Hsieh @ 12:28 AM
This map shows clearly how much of the Western US is owned by the federal government:The United States government has direct ownership of almost 650 million acres of land (2.63 million square kilometers) - nearly 30% of its total territory. These federal lands are used as military bases or testing grounds, nature parks and reserves and indian reservations, or are leased to the private sector for commercial exploitation (e.g. forestry, mining, agriculture). They are managed by different administrations, such as the Bureau of Land Management, the US Forest Service, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the US Department of Defense, the US Army Corps of Engineers, the US Bureau of Reclamation or the Tennessee Valley Authority.
This map details the percentage of state territory owned by the federal government. The top 10 list of states with the highest percentage of federally owned land looks like this:
1. Nevada 84.5%
2. Alaska 69.1%
3. Utah 57.4%
4. Oregon 53.1%
5. Idaho 50.2%
6. Arizona 48.1%
7. California 45.3%
8. Wyoming 42.3%
9. New Mexico 41.8%
10. Colorado 36.6% The following thought then occurred to me. One day, the US is going to face a financial crisis due to the insolvency of Social Security that will make the current mortgage crisis look like chump change in comparison. And everyone who advocates privatizing Social Security also points out that there would be huge transition costs.
So the question is whether those costs (or overall transition costs of moving from the current mixed economy to a fully consistent system of laissez-faire capitalism) could be covered by selling off those Federal lands? It might conceivably have to be done in stages to avoid depressing the market by dumping all that land on the market at once.
But there is something appealing about the idea of paying for the transition costs of privatizing our economy by a method which also privatizes a big chunk of US government assets.Labels: Cool, Economics
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Friday, June 27, 2008 |
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A Moral Example of Salami Slicing |
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By Greg Perkins @ 12:47 AM
Remember that technique which showed up in the plots of movies like Superman III, Hackers, and Office Space, where someone would change bank software to take fractions of cents from transactions like interest payments and funnel them all into one account? Nobody misses a fraction of a cent -- but given enough transactions over time, the sum can really add up! That's what they call "Salami Slicing."
Of course it is stealing in cases like that, but the same idea of accumulating vast numbers of tiny values that are hardly noticeable could legitimately pay off, too.
Consider this fact about driving your vehicle: left turns often require waiting for oncoming traffic to clear, taking a little more time and gas on average than right turns do. Now, this doesn't make all that much of a difference to most of us (just like the above fraction of a cent we may or may not get in interest from the bank) -- but if you have a fleet of 90,000 big brown trucks that follow the routes you schedule for them each day to deliver packages, then adjusting your software to minimize left turns could really add up!
Last year, according to Heather Robinson, a U.P.S. spokeswoman, the software helped the company shave 28.5 million miles off its delivery routes, which has resulted in savings of roughly three million gallons of gas...
That's some serious scratch, especially with the price of gas today! I love it -- kudos to the brain at UPS who saw and brilliantly exploited this little fact.
[HT: Jason]Labels: Business, Cool, Ethics
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